The Postmodern Predicament

The Postmodern Predicament From the perspective of Evolutionary Enlightenment, you are very important. Not your individual qualities, your unique personality, or your particular gifts and talents. What makes you important is that you have the extraordinary capacity to directly awaken to the fact that who you are is not separate from the energy and intelligence that created the universe. Even more significantly, you have the power to take responsibility for who you really are, if you choose to. In theological terms, this means that you can choose to become God—God as the creative principle. Your human form and your sophisticated capacity for consciousness and cognition is, as far as we know, the highest expression of what the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process has produced so far. This is where the entire fourteen-billion-year process has come: to you and me, the most complex forms of sentient life, with our miraculous faculties for self-reflective awareness and conscious choice. Remember, it is only through the awakening human, who is able to cognize the depth and vastness of the process that he or she is a part of, that the creative principle can awaken to itself. As we have seen, that principle cannot know itself directly through a stone, a worm, a butterfly, a giraffe. Even the majority of human beings are not cognizant of the evolutionary impulse in this way. Those who have to struggle from day to day just to survive and feed their families don't have the luxury of the time or education to even begin to think about these philosophical questions. But those of us at the very leading edge of cultural development today are in a different position altogether. That's why I often say we are the luckiest people that have ever been born in the history of our species. Think about it for a moment: if you are reading a book like this, the likelihood is that you are among the luckiest people who have ever been born. To begin with, you are one of those privileged to have received a high degree of education. People like you and me have access to information that wasn't available until very recently—about the life process, about our psychological interiors, our biological functioning, our cultural development, the natural history of our planet, and the evolution of the expanding cosmos. Besides this wealth of knowledge, we also have a degree of material wealth, comfort, security, and leisure time that is historically unprecedented. The standard of living that we take for granted, kings and queens of old could not have imagined. And on top of all this, we enjoy a degree of freedom that is unparalleled—personal, political, religious, and philosophical. There have never been human beings who have had the extraordinary liberty we have to experiment with our own lives—to think in whatever way we want, to do almost anything we want, to say anything we want, to go anywhere we want, to be whatever we want. If you let this in, you will marvel at how lucky you really are, how blessed, how fortunate. The problem is, most of us don't seem to know it. We don't act as if it is true. The luckiest people in the world don't seem to be aware of how lucky they are. The significant minority of us who do have the time, the circumstances, and the level of development to be able to be conscious vehicles for the evolutionary impulse are too busy worrying about ourselves. The tragic irony of our cultural predicament is that many of the most highly evolved and privileged people on the planet are lost in an emotional, psycho­logical, philosophical, and spiritual relationship to life that tends to be very superficial. Do you live as if you knew that you were potentially the leading edge of the interior of the evolving cosmos? Do you act as if the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process was depending on the choices that you make and the actions that you take? The lives that so many of us lead are clearly disconnected from this overwhelming truth. Most of us appear to be oblivious to our extraordinary good fortune. Even if we're intellectually capable of recognizing it, we still don't tend to feel very lucky. More often than not, we feel miserable, victimized, sorry for ourselves. Most of us are so absorbed in our small personal worlds that we hardly even glimpse the big picture. From a vast, cosmic perspective, it's a tragedy. It's a waste of evolution's gifts. Too many of us are simply not available for these higher potentials to emerge within us, because our attention is so distracted. God could be shouting, "I need you!" at the top of His or Her lungs, and we wouldn't even hear. This state of affairs is what I often call "the postmodern predicament." And it's not your predicament—it's our predicament. It's not a personal problem; it's a cultural, cosmic, and evolutionary problem. To grasp the picture I'm trying to share, you need to make the effort to look at it not from your ego's perspective but from the perspective of the process itself. In order to do this, let's once again entertain a theological fantasy. Imagine, for a moment, that you are God—the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process. And as that divine creator, you are utterly dependent upon human beings to be able to know who you are and consciously act in the cosmos that you have created. You have gradually nurtured, over billions of years of biological evolution, the emergence of ever-more complex forms of life. You have cultivated, over tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution, the human capacity for higher consciousness and cognition. Finally, a moment came where human beings could recognize you directly—not as animistic nature spirits, embodied superheroes, or an anthropomorphic father figure in the sky. In the past few thousand years, following in the footsteps of the greatest mystics from the emerging religious traditions, they began to awaken to your infinite nature in the depths of consciousness, as the timeless, formless ground of Being. And now, in the past few hundred years, they are starting to be able to recognize that you are also that dynamic force which is driving evolutionary Becoming throughout the cosmos. Because they now have the ability to know you directly as both Being and Becoming, you can, at long last, consciously enter into the process through their human hearts and minds. But then, as God, you look at these precious vehicles that you have patiently created for no other purpose than your own conscious participation in the process, and what are they doing? They are lost in their separate, privileged, personal worlds, with little or no sense of who they really are, oblivious to the grandeur and the majesty of what it could mean to live your glory as themselves. As long as they're trapped in their personal worlds, they are of little use to you—you can't take your own next step through them. So your creative powers would be inhibited in the realm of manifestation by their unknowing self-absorption. You would be forced to wait, in divine frustration, for the luckiest people who have ever been born to awaken. * * * It may be a big stretch to see your own life from this God's-eye view, from the vantage point of the creative principle. But if you are serious about the evolution of the interior of the cosmos, it's essential that you do. Unless you are able to see your own presence here within its ever-evolving cosmic and cultural context, it will be difficult to have spiritual confidence, to know what the most appropriate next steps are. The teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is about the evolution of cosmos and culture as yourself. So it is essential that you make the effort to see your own self and your life-circumstances from the biggest possible perspective, and relate to your own predicament as our shared predicament. The particular cultural predicament that the luckiest people to have ever been born find themselves in is ironic and paradoxical. The greatest achievement that the creative process has produced in us, the miraculous capacity that makes it possible for consciousness and culture to evolve through us, has become our prison and the biggest obstacle to our higher development. I'm speaking about our uniquely postmodern, highly individuated separate self-sense. The individuated self is one way that ego is often defined. And in this sense of the word, I like to say that the ego is both your best friend and your worst enemy. It is your best friend because, in the most positive sense, it represents your capacity to individuate—to see yourself as a unique, autonomous entity and to bear witness to your own experience with some measure of objectivity. Individuation is what makes it possible for you to be a conscious agent of evolution, a vessel for Spirit in action. The more profound our individuation, the more powerfully Spirit can shine through us. However, ego is also our worst enemy. For too many of us, as I have described, over-identification with our separate individuality obscures the deeper and higher spiritual dimensions of our being. The more the self evolves, the more individuated we become, the more our ego develops, in the positive sense, the greater our capacity is to see our experience of consciousness in context. When you're a small baby, almost all you are aware of is your biological impulses; there is little if any ability to distinguish between yourself and the world around you. As you develop and mature, you gain a greater capacity to differentiate between your internal experience and your external environment, enabling you to more clearly define yourself as a separate and distinct entity. In this process, you are able to see your life in greater and more inclusive contexts, which means that as you individuate, you also consciously embrace more and more of the universe, both internal and external. In this way, through you, the energy and intelligence that created the universe is able to not only see more and more of its own creation, but engage consciously with it, in all its ever-increasing complexity. The ego, in this sense, is the greatest achievement that the creative process has produced. That's why I say it's our best friend. It is also, however, our worst enemy, because today many of us have, as I have been describing, become so over-identified with our individual self-sense and its personal story that in spite of being able to cognize more of the cosmos than any human beings have ever been able to, we have lost touch with our deeper spiritual purpose within that cosmos. Because many of us have grown up in a modern and postmodern secular context that recognizes no higher universal truth beyond the fears and desires, whims and preferences of the personal self, slowly but surely the ego has become our most cherished reference point. We have allowed it to usurp the central place that God or Spirit used to hold in traditional cultures. In traditional cultures, God or Spirit was the unquestioned reference point for higher meaning and purpose. But those of us at the leading edge of modern and postmodern culture today have largely rejected what we perceived as outdated traditional moral, philosophical, and spiritual worldviews. And as of yet, we haven't really found anything to replace them as a source of higher meaning and purpose. That is why, at this moment in history, for the most privileged people in the world, the ego has become so focused on itself. Evolution's great achievement—our capacity for individuation—has in many ways become a dead end. When you have a highly developed ego without a spiritual context and a deeper sense of purpose, it's likely to be an unhealthy situation. In the way that I perceive it, there is just too much evolutionary potential in the individuated self for its only reference point to be a small personal "I." Remember, from the perspective of evolution, the emergence of the individuated self is quite a triumph. But in our culture, there is no clear upward channel through which that self's greater potential can be realized, and therefore, it inevitably turns in on itself, creating a distortion in the personality and in the culture we build together. There is no psychological solution to these problems. The only solution is spiritual. The solution is discovering the ego is not the center of the universe; it's but a small part of a very big picture. When you discover that who you truly are is the God-impulse, you see that your ego is just a psychological structure, a highly sophisticated vehicle through which the energy and intelligence that initiated the evolutionary process can more consciously and deliberately engage with the world. Surely, it was never intended to be merely a vehicle for self-absorption and self-infatuation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for the luckiest people who have ever been born, it seems that our passionate pursuit of individuation has reached its apex. We have discovered that we are part of a vast, complex, multidimensional fourteen-billion-year process that is evolving, right now, as ourselves. And our ability to recognize this vast trajectory that lies behind us and that still lives within us allows us to appreciate the tremendous significance of the moment we are in, as we reach for the next stage of cultural and cosmic emergence. The awakening to this evolutionary perspective shatters the postmodern predicament. And it is up to those of us who recognize this liberating context—the luckiest people in the world—to make ourselves available to the energy and intelligence that has, over tens of thousands of years, patiently cultivated our human capacity for higher consciousness and cognition, so that it can take the next step, through us and as us.